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"Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth"
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| September 2010
www.gprc.org
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"We're the 'works' part of "Faith and Works." -- Jarid Manos, Founder & CEO/GPRC
Dear Friend of Great Plains Restoration Council,
After more than a year and a half of planning and design, Restoration Not Incarceration™ has officially begun with boots on the ground!
In the hottest Houston August on record, Great Plains Restoration Council's first four participants, along with GPRC Founder & CEO Jarid Manos, Operations Manager Fredysia Wright, and Criminal Justice Coordinator Barbara Holguin, began work on a coastal prairie pilot project site in south Houston.
The new site will be christened Esteban Park, after Esteban the Moor, a Moroccan slave who washed ashore on the Texas coast with Spanish conquistadors in 1528 and learned to live as part of the coastal prairie wilderness and the local Karankawa people (who are now extinct). The land was donated into this new Park project by Pastors Rudy and Juanita Rasmus of St. John's United Methodist Church Downtown. Our first crew has soared with personal and ecological growth during these past few months, having not only been formerly incarcerated but homeless at the Bread of Life Shelter. (SEE PHOTOS BELOW.)
Esteban Park will be a restored native coastal prairie, with an urban organic farm in the front, and serve as an ecological learning and social work center.
Esteban Park is the first of several new parks planned, and allows close-in training and new Green Jobs creation while planning and preparation continues on additional smaller urban parks as well as larger future wildland recovery projects several thousand acres each in size both here in Texas and, upcoming, on the High Plains of northeastern New Mexico.
GPRC pairs ecological work with social work in a twin-strand approach to healing.
*Restoration Not Incarceration™ is an environmentally-based initiative targeting the restoration of Houston's prairies, bayous, wetlands and Gulf Coast shore in conjunction with rehabilitation of juveniles and adults in the Harris County Corrections System.*
Utilizing nature-based work therapy, supported by restoration ecologists and social workers, GPRC's innovative three-tiered Ecological Health approach helps young people "heal themselves through healing the Earth".
RNI was built out of GPRC's award-winning Plains Youth InterACTION™ program, and is being designed for standardized replication in other locations.
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NATIVE COASTAL PRAIRIE ON VERGE OF EXTINCTION
There is less than 1% remaining of native coastal prairie.
CRADLE TO PRISON PIPELINE
Major studies show that straight incarceration usually leads to more incarceration.
NEW ECONOMY, NEW JOBS, MASSIVE CARBON SEQUESTRATION POTENTIAL
GPRC
is part of a new Green Jobs Consortium that is advocating for the
business community to invest in new Green Jobs in wildlands restoration
and reduce its carbon footprint while providing several other
simultaneous benefits like flood control, water filtration, critical
wildlife habitat, parks for people, and employment and second chances
for struggling individuals. (Native prairies uptake carbon from the
atmosphere and store it in the soil for thousands of years.)
THANKS
TO LEAD FUNDER HOUSTON ENDOWMENT, INC., as well as Pastors Rudy and
Juanita Rasmus and St. John's Downtown, Jacob and Terese Hershey
Foundation, Banner Foundation, Ms. Cyrene Inman, Powell Foundation,
Trull Foundation, and the George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation
for providing the seed funding to get Restoration Not Incarceration
planned, designed, and into first-stage implementation.
"OPEN
PARK" DEDICATION OF ESTEBAN PARK
Saturday, October 23, 2010, from 11
a.m. to 3 p.m.
Dedication ceremonies at 12 noon.
For more information,
please contact GPRC at 832.598.GPRC, or info@gprc.org |
Rare pocket of remnant native coastal prairie discovered directly adjacent to the first restoration project (Site of the upcoming brand new "Esteban Park").
Slender gayfeather flower and bumblebee
Prairie Indian Plantain
Overview shot of rare (incredible coincidence) remnant native coastal prairie adjacent to our restoration site. Since this is southeast Houston, how did it survive the plantation days, and then post World War II urban expansion, and thrive intact and to a high degree of quality in 2010?
Actual work site (adjacent to remnant native prairie pocket) *Site is an overgrown old field filled with brush and many non-native species, especially Chinese tallow, all of which we are taking out by hand.
Crew Member Danielle Daniels.
GPRC Crew Foreman Kevin Raney, a senior at Chavez High School, collecting seed heads of Giant Coneflower.
Getting ready for a day's work in the hot August coastal prairie heat.
Snow-on-the-Prairie wildflower. In the back of our restoration site, which will be restored to coastal prairie, we are glad to find more and more native plants that are still surviving, even though the site is tangled in overgrowth and large Chinese
tallow trees.
First steps to building a new wetland.
Calvin Glenn and Brian Partee digging the basin of the new wetland.
One day's work: from a tangle of brush to a platted wetland.
Taking a break during the hottest Houston August on record.
In the front part of the new Park, Lewis Wilturner removes brush and tree overgrowth in preparation for the organic farm that will be planted there. The front part of the site was an old plowed field left fallow for a couple decades. Aside from poison ivy, there is very little ground cover.
A few native hackberries, mayhaws, and dogwoods will be left standing where the front organic farm will be. Looking to the back is where the prairie will begin.
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This work has occurred because of your generous support, for which we are immensely grateful.
Please help us continue toward that time of health, peace and renewal by considering a donation to Great Plains Restoration Council today. Your tax-deductible gift goes straight to our important work.
http://www.gprc.org/makeadonation.html
Thank you very much for caring - from all of us out here in the land of sun, wind, grass and blue sky.
Please also pass this email on to any of your friends and family. THANK YOU.
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